Testing a Votecounter (prev. Any Mods Willing to Volunteer?)

[Thesp]

Are there any mods out there who are willing to help me test out an automatic vote-counter I've been working on? There will be cake. If so, all I need you to do is this:

1) On the first page of the game (preferably in the first post), you must include an area tag with the title as "Living Players". Inside this area tag, on a separate line for each, is a list of every living player in the game. If a player has been replaced, the current player

must

be listed first, then afterwards preceded by " (replaces playername)". If replacing multiple people, each must be listed within the parentheses like so: " (replaces playername; playername2; playername3)".
2) In the same post, you must include an area tag with the title, "Links". Inside this area tag, you can have links to different parts of the game, but the last link

must

be a link to the first post of the most recent Day, and be written like so: "Day X - Post 273". (Actually, all I

really

care about is that there is at least one link in the area, and that the last "word" of the last link in the area is the post number for the most recent Day.)
3) Let me know that your game conforms to these standards.

Here's an example of what you would need on the first page:

Code: Select all

[area=Living Players]
Bob
Carol (replaces Joe)
Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)
Julio
[/area]

[area=Links]
[post=#3329643]Day 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Night 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Day 2: Post #532[/post]
[/area]

...and how that code looks:

Living Players

Bob
Carol (replaces Joe)
Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)
Julio

Links

Day 1: Post #2
Night 1: Post #531
Day 2: Post #532

I might do this super-fast and have a beta version done by next week, or it might take me significantly longer and it takes a few months. No telling. It depends on how much time I can carve out for this project. Likewise, I won't be able to even show you the results of the vote counter for a while, possibly even until after your game is done. Sorry. However, it will help me get things ironed out, and if we're lucky and I can get it working right, we can have a utility to make votecounts easier for mods until we get some kind of official one built into the forums. Thanks!

[xRECKONERx]

I have a mininormal hitting queue soon, I'll use it there

[Thesp]

I have a mininormal hitting queue soon, I'll use it there

Thanks! The more, the merrier - I'll take as many people as will volunteer.

[Titus]

YES! I VOLUNTEER!

Starting from day 2 in WiFom City.

[Thesp]

Feel free to put the information in your start post now if you like - the vote counter won't auto-post in your game. Instead, it will be a website where you'll enter a link to your game, and it will give you a BBCode pre-formatted votecount you can copy and paste into the game. It will also alert you to any votes it's not sure it interpreted right. I'll let you know when I've got the site up and running, but in the meanwhile, feel free to add the above info to your game if you like.

[Untrod Tripod]

I'll volunteer

[callforjudgement]

Feel free to put the information in your start post now if you like - the vote counter won't auto-post in your game. Instead, it will be a website where you'll enter a link to your game, and it will give you a BBCode pre-formatted votecount you can copy and paste into the game. It will also alert you to any votes it's not sure it interpreted right. I'll let you know when I've got the site up and running, but in the meanwhile, feel free to add the above info to your game if you like. :)

As someone who's written a similar tool myself, how are you handling the following common issues?:

• Replacements
  
• Players abbreviating/misspelling votes
  
• Unusual formatting for votes or unvotes

There are some other issues that mods care about, such as doublevoters and the like, but those don't come up as often.

[Mr. Flay]

/in

[Thesp]

Feel free to put the information in your start post now if you like - the vote counter won't auto-post in your game. Instead, it will be a website where you'll enter a link to your game, and it will give you a BBCode pre-formatted votecount you can copy and paste into the game. It will also alert you to any votes it's not sure it interpreted right. I'll let you know when I've got the site up and running, but in the meanwhile, feel free to add the above info to your game if you like.

As someone who's written a similar tool myself, how are you handling the following common issues?:

• Replacements
  
• Players abbreviating/misspelling votes
  
• Unusual formatting for votes or unvotes

There are some other issues that mods care about, such as doublevoters and the like, but those don't come up as often.

Good questions!
1) Replacements are handled by putting the replaced player entirely in the shoes of the replacement player. That is, it finds the most current player for the slot (based on the properly formatted opening post), and for all times it would find the replaced player's name (as author or as person being voted), it replaces it with the replacement player. (I'm programming in Python, so I use a dictionary for the replaced players as keys, and the replacement players as values for those keys.)
2) I use Python's difflib for finding the closest match to the player's name. If it finds a match within a particular tolerance, great! If it doesn't meet a certain tolerance, it will warn the user about that vote, and provide a link to the post in question for the user to verify the correct votee. It does not like abbreviations at all and often misses the correct votee, but it definitely throws a warning on those for verification.
3) It loves seeing official votes. It handles any form of "vote:" that uses a colon, whether or not it is bolded. If a user uses the word vote without a colon, it will entirely miss it. This is somewhat by design - there are too many cases where people will use the word "vote", whether bolded or not, outside the context of trying to vote someone. However, if a mod wants to use the program, they may have to beat it into a few user's heads to use some proper formatting. If this becomes a widespread tool, I imagine the need to remind players to use proper formatting will be lessened.

It's not equipped to handle any unusual voting mechanisms Things like double-voters will have to be manually adjusted after the fact by the user.

[xtopherusD]

Ooh, interesting!

What happens when a player quotes a post that another voted in? How will it know to not attribute the second instance of that "vote:" to the second person?

[Thesp]

Ooh, interesting!

What happens when a player quotes a post that another voted in? How will it know to not attribute the second instance of that "vote:" to the second person?

It truncates out all quoted text before processing a post to look for votes.

[callforjudgement]

Here's my answers to the same questions:

1) The mod maintains a list of players who are meant to be playing, separately from the game (in a vote counter configuration page). It's actually a list of slots; if a player is replaced, then both the old player and new player are listed as part of the slot. So pretty much the same as you're doing.
2) Each vote has a drop-down box on the interface that allows the mod to override who it's voting for. If a player votes for someone who isn't the name of a player, the vote counter warns the moderator and refuses to count the vote until that particular vote is overridden. Abbreviations for player names can be added to the list of players in a slot in order to automatically recognise those abbreviations.
3) The counter will consider any text that's bolded (including via use of the "vote" tag), and contains the word "vote", as a vote or unvote. It will check to see if votes or unvotes happen later in the bolded region in order to determine whether something is a vote or unvote (thus, it isn't fooled by something like "

Unvote: callforjudgement

"). In cases where it thinks there might be a vote but there isn't (e.g.

Mod: I think callforjudgement has 4 votes, not 5

, it will recognise it as a potential vote and ask the mod to override it as a vote for a particular player / no lynch, unvote, or not a vote.

WRT xtopherusD's question:
4) It ignores all quoted text when counting votes.

(Here's a fifth issue that actually came up in practice: what happens if someone votes in spoiler tags? My vote counter counts it, at least.)

[saulres]

what happens if someone votes in spoiler tags?

Why would someone do that? And do mods really count that?

[Thesp]

what happens if someone votes in spoiler tags?

Why would someone do that? And do mods really count that?

I don't

think

that mine would pick up a vote in a spoiler tag, but like saulres, I don't think that's a significant issue. If anything, votes in spoiler tags should be strongly, strongly discouraged (if even ever counted at all).

[Mr. Flay]

I would not count a vote inside a

Spoiler:

tag. I might be able to convince myself of a situation in which the inline blackout version would count.

[Zachrulez]

what happens if someone votes in spoiler tags?

Why would someone do that? And do mods really count that?

I've never actually encountered a situation like that as a mod before. My inclination is that the vote doesn't count since it's extremely easy for the players to miss it. Too much potential for confusion.

But now that I think about it, is there any in-game value to allowing the spoiler tag at all?

[quadz08]

To shorten gigantic posts / quote walls

[N]

I would not count a vote inside a

Spoiler:

tag. I might be able to convince myself of a situation in which the inline blackout version would count.

I don't think you should allow blackout spoilers in-game, because they are impossible for people on phones to read.

[Mr. Flay]

Also a good point; however if they're combined with text coloration then they just become

flavored

text

.

[callforjudgement]

Why would someone do that? And do mods really count that?

I think it was a mistake (vote at the end of a long post that had been spoilered for length, and the vote was accidentally inside rather than outside the spoiler). My response was to quote the vote inside the spoiler tag, mention it was inside the spoiler tag, then not count it.

I brought up the issue mostly because a naive computer program, as opposed to a human, reading a page will see the insides of spoiler tags, and not even be aware that the spoiler tag is there without special coding. Thus, it might count a vote that most mods would prefer not to count.

[PeregrineV]

Code added to Newbie 1481

http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=39621

[Thesp]

I have a site up and running now. If you want to try it, PM me with a link to your game that meets the formatting standards in the first post.

By the way, you

can

include the initial information in spoiler tags, so it doesn't take up valuable real estate in your opening post if you like. So, something like:

Code: Select all

[spoiler=Votecounter Settings]
[area=Living Players]
Bob
Carol (replaces Joe)
Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)
Julio
[/area]

[area=Links]
[post=#3329643]Day 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Night 1[/post]
[post=#3329643]Day 2: Post #532[/post]
[/area]
[/spoiler]

...will look just like this...

Spoiler: Votecounter Settings

Living Players

Bob
Carol (replaces Joe)
Sue (replaces Tom; Lisa)
Julio

Links

Day 1
Night 1
Day 2: Post #532

[xRECKONERx]

Suggestion: allow for a way to use manual nicknames for players? For example, a lot of longer names get abbreviated (DrippingGoofball -> DGB) and it's kind of a pain to ask players to just use the full name every time.

[Thesp]

Suggestion: allow for a way to use manual nicknames for players? For example, a lot of longer names get abbreviated (DrippingGoofball -> DGB) and it's kind of a pain to ask players to just use the full name every time.

Interestingly, you can actually do this manually by listing "DGB" as a replacement. You may also want to list "dgb" as a replacement if you have players too lazy to use the shift key. So, something like...

Code: Select all

DrippingGoofball (replaces DGB; dgb)

...in the Living Players tag will cause the votecounter to add "DGB" and "dgb" to the name list, and will always substitute "DrippingGoofball" for that name.

I may add some code in the future to make that more explicit (perhaps allowing you to write "(alias DGB; dgb)"?), but it will be after more testing before I update, unless something is seriously broken.

[T-Bone]

This looks really cool. Great work.